]]>Jason Calacanis, the man behind media startups like Mahalo and Weblogs Inc., has his sights set on a new frontier that he thinks could be as promising as blogs were in the early part of this decade: namely, mobile content curation. On Tuesday, he and former Atlantic Wire editor Gabriel Snyder are launching a new iOS app and website called Inside that Calacanis says will give users access to the best journalism and media on the web, powered by human editors.

Calacanis, who is also a venture investor and the founder of the Launch conference for startups, said in an interview that he has been working on the ideas behind the app for some time, and that his “Launch Ticker” email newsletter was a kind of alpha version of what has become Inside — in the sense that it was intended to give readers a quick summary of all the tech news they needed to know. The newsletter got more than 5,000 signups and about 700 of those converted to paying $100 a year after it went paid access, he said.

“That was a test, a kind of minimum viable product to test the idea behind Inside. We wanted to look at what would be the atomic unit of content if you started doing news from scratch.”

Finding the atomic unit of news

What Inside came up with, Calacanis said, is a summary that includes a photo, headline and about 300 characters worth of description about the news. “No link-baiting, just the facts of the story,” he said. The Inside app also has a prominent link to the original source, and Calacanis made a point of saying that the source his editors link to “will never be an aggregator” like Business Insider or BuzzFeed, but always the first and/or best source for that information.

The Inside app and accompanying website will have between 700 and a thousand updates on any given day, Calacanis said, and every one of them will be “written by humans — no algorithms. And we will only link to the best, original journalism.” A user can vote to say whether they want to see more or less of that topic, and swiping the page to the left reveals the next story in the same category.

The mobile focus of Inside, and the term “atomic unit of news,” sound very similar to Circa, the news-curation app that Matt Galligan and former Reuters editor Anthony De Rosa have been building, with financing from Ben Huh of the I Can Has Cheezburger empire. Calacanis — who said he is an investor in Circa — agreed there are similarities, but says the use case is different.

“Circa covers about 20 stories a day, and they’ll often do 1,000 words on a topic. They consider themselves journalists, but we consider ourselves curators — we’ll do a thousand stories or updates a day where they do 20. We will link to them, to their coverage of an event, if it’s the most definitive one.”

After my interview with Calacanis, Circa CEO Matt Galligan sent an email noting that Circa actually updates or posts hundreds of stories every day, depending on the volume of content it has. It has editors and writers working around the clock.

Native advertising in the news stream

And what is the business model for a news-curation app like Inside? Calacanis said that the most obvious model would be “native” advertising that appears inside a category, where advertisers would write their own summary and include a video or photo — in much the same way that Instagram is including ads within its stream of photos. “So when you swipe a card, there might be one from E*Trade or Jenny Craig, that kind of thing,” he said.

However, Calacanis said that Inside won’t need to worry about that kind of revenue generation for at least a year or more, and is planning to just focus on growing its audience. The investors behind the venture — including Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk, CBS and Fred Wilson — are the same group who financed the entrepreneur’s Mahalo content/search portal, which was designed as a human-powered search engine. That business still exists, Calacanis said, but it was more or less killed by Google’s “Panda” update to its search algorithm.

Although Inside’s news-summary curation seems like the kind of thing Google could quite easily create using Google News, Calacanis says he isn’t worried because Google “could never do it — they have no respect for human curation. I don’t see them trying to hire writers, because they don’t value writers or creators.” Calacanis said that while he had planned to use machine-curated content to fill out the human-generated summaries in the Inside app, he quickly decided to scrap that idea because the quality level was so low.

News powered by humans, not computers

The other app that sounds very similar to what Inside wants to do is Yahoo’s new mobile news app, which is based in part on their acquisition of Summly, the startup founded by teenaged entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio that served up computer-generated summaries of news stories. Calacanis said Summly and the Yahoo app also suffer from the same machine-learning problem, however:

“I looked at investing in Summly — the design was beautiful, and I liked Nick because he’s smart, but the algorithm summarizing stuff just didn’t work… maybe eventually that might work at some point in the future, but not now.”

Gabriel Snyder, who left Atlantic Media to become Inside’s chief content officer, said that one of the problems with approaches like Yahoo’s is that they narrow down the available content by only producing 10 updates a day. In a sense, he said, it feels like they “want to put the genie back in the bottle” and go back to the days when a newspaper or TV broadcast only gave its audience a handful of stories that editors chose. “That’s just not in keeping with the changing nature of people’s news consumption habits,” he said.

Snyder added that he believes the opportunity in mobile news “feels akin to 2002 and the web, when everyone knew the web was going to be huge but it wasn’t clear how people would get the news. Then people like Jason came along with Weblogs Inc. and my former boss Nick Denton with Gawker. I think we’re at that same point with mobile right now.”

But more importantly, Calacanis informed YouTube that it had better watch out, because he wasn’t the only person working on YouTube who felt this way, and:

Since YouTube doesn’t have to create any content, just aggregate it, they don’t need to worry about the individual profitability of any one brand. Things can be dying and soaring and going sideways throughout their ecosystem, but as long as they have a ton of traffic and control the relationships with advertisers, they win. (…)

Bottom line: someone needs to create a viable alternative to YouTube, even if it’s the top 100 channels on YouTube getting together and creating their own product that lets content creators *own* the *relationship* with their users and advertisers.

On the surface, these declarations felt seismic — but in the ensuing days, it turns out that to many within the industry, it wasn’t as big a surprise as you’d think. Calacanis, it turns out, was simply saying what a lot of other people were already thinking: That YouTube’s power over web creators was, for some, starting to chaff, and that alternatives might be the best approach, especially given that the needs of major YouTube stars don’t necessarily match with the needs of the casual YouTube user.

“Part of the beauty of YouTube is that ANYONE with access to nothing more than a video camera and an internet connection can either overnight or over time become a worldwide sensation and a household name. I think YouTube wants to always be a place where someone who currently has zero views and zero subscribes can become the next Jenna Marbles, Toby Turner, Phil DeFranco, Freddie Wong, or Justin Bieber,” Tubefilter co-founder Josh Cohen said in an email interview. “But in order to be that place, it can’t simply solely promote programming that’s already successful on the platform and already receiving hundreds of thousands or millions of views. It has to give up-and-comers the opportunity and marketing space to grow.”

Which is why those have already established their audiences on YouTube may be looking outside of the system for new solutions to the issues Calacanis raised.

Multi-channel networks range from the huge (Fullscreen currently boasts 10,000 channels as a part of its network) to the tiny (Geek and Sundry just launched a curated network which promises a cap of 20 vloggers), each providing a variety of services that ranges from company to company. But in general, they exist to provide creators with production resources, connect them with potential sponsorships — and in some cases, take a cut of the profits.

But those profits would be greater if the networks weren’t beholden to YouTube for distribution. Cohen suggested that Fullscreen might be the other company considering the launch of its own platform: “They currently have more monthly US unique visitors than any network outside of VEVO, could benefit from a network effect of having all their programming within one URL or player environment, and have made some recent hires (including Tim Mohn, who helped create HBO Go) that hint they’re planning something to do with online video viewing in the very near future.”

And personally, I think the recently acquired tween-friendly AwesomenessTV (which does have a network side) might also fit the profile. It has serious investment going for it thanks to DreamWorks Animation and it’s built a large audience in a relatively short period of time; plus, that audience is young enough to make a new platform into a regular habit.

Also, speaking as a consumer of web video, I have a humble plea: Whichever companies are considering their own platform, please sink huge amounts of money into video player development. Huge amounts of money. Think Scrooge McDuck.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPX5mRSQ3pw]

Because these new platforms won’t have the advantage that YouTube’s player has — years and years of development — and they will be courting audiences expecting a similar level of quality. I’m not saying YouTube’s player is perfect. But it’s a lot better than the majority of third-party options.

For a YouTube network or other company with a fanbase dedicated enough to follow their favorites to a new destination, a new platform could be the best decision ever made. But I suspect that the actual number of entities with the large and fervent audience required is very very small — and we’ll see a few crash and burn along the way.

]]>Getting local businesses on board with any kind of digital marketing or payment service can be a tough sales nut to crack. But how many people really want to call up a local hairdresser or nail salon to book an appointment if an online booking option existed? In our increasingly phone-averse society, online is usually far more popular.

Which is why one entrepreneur has launched MyTime, a site that lets small businesses create profiles and sync their bookings calendars to allow customers to discover their sites and book appointments through the website, eschewing the potential pitfalls of local deal sites like Groupon.

The site, which is starting out with businesses in L.A. but looking to expand, allows businesses to create a page for their company, sync up with Yelp reviews and ratings, sync appointment calendars, and set deals for particular slots to entice customers to less popular times. The service is free to join, but companies that let MyTime promote their offers through dynamic pricing, Google AdWords, Twitter ads, and other solutions give up 40 percent of revenue from bookings that come through the promotions (excluding existing customers). Anderson said about half the businesses so far have taken advantage of the marketing option.

The site exists right now as primarily a desktop website that’s optimized for mobile, but Anderson said developing native apps is up next. He points out that while local review and ratings sites are common (think Yelp, Foursquare, etc.), the actual booking component is not as well widespread.

“Our vision for the business is that you connect your calendar once and then everything is taken care of. We bring your customers back, and we allow you to later connect with your consumers. And for the customer, it’s the ultimate convenience,” he said. “I feel like no one else has brought together the calendar and the pricing and the actual e-commerce experience. ”

]]>With rising real-estate prices and increasing demand for city living in San Francisco, most people in Silicon Valley aren’t terribly worried about the plight of landlords right now. But for every open house that results in throngs of wannabe-renters on the sidewalk clamoring to submit pages of applications for closet-sized apartments, there’s a landlord who has to weed through the details and pick the right renter. And once they find a renter, the landlord has to actually collect checks.

Cozy, a San Francisco-based startup founded in March, plans to announce Thursday that it’s raised $1.5 million in seed funding to standardize the application and rental payment processes for landlords nationwide. The round was led by the Social+Capital Partnership, and included investments from Google Ventures (Kevin Rose was behind the deal), Tim Ferriss, Jason Calacanis and Gary Vaynerchuk.

The site, which had been testing its product this year and is now accepting members for its beta product, attacks two key points of interaction between landlord and tenants: the application process and monthly rent payments. The founders hope that standardizing these interactions will benefit both landlord and tenant and provide a digital record for both down the line. Cozy is available nationwide, and so far, has seen the most interest from landlords in the Bay area, Portland, and New York City.

The founders have created a shorter, more succinct rental application that asks only what landlords need to know about applicants and tries to eliminate unnecessary or repetitive questions. CEO Gino Zahnd explained in an interview that most rental applications ask far more questions than landlords actually want to know, and provide details best left for the actual lease. Zahnd said that most landlords just want to know if a tenant will pay his rent on time.

The other aspect of Cozy’s product helps tenants looking to prove their competency to landlords. Cozy allows landlords using the app to collect and track monthly payments online, and provides renters with digital proof of their reliable payments, something which isn’t reflected in credit reports. The process allows landlords of multiple buildings or apartments to manage payments without using paper.

Cozy is led by Zahnd and John Bragg, who worked together at Kosmix, which is now Walmart Labs, and then at Seabright Studios, a user experience firm. Previously, Zahnd worked for Flickr, Splunk, and Adaptive Path, and Bragg with Capital One.

Update: If you were looking for signs of hyper-inflation in the San Francisco real estate market, then look no further than 888 Brannan, an iconic 95-year-old building that till recently has played home to San Francisco’s Jewelry Mart. This building is across the street from the San Francisco Concourse Exhibit Center, which is often used to host tech industry events such as Techcrunch Disrupt and Jason Calacanis’ Launch conferences. It is yards away from the Zynga offices and it has a new tenant.

It is the new home for AirBnB, a San Francisco-based person-to-person room, apartment and house-rental company that is soon going to be moving to new offices. The company has signed a lease on this space, and has taken a whopping 170,000 square feet of space. The news was first reported by James Temple of San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year. What is astounding is the length of this lease — 10 years — and AirBnB will pay almost $97 million over that length of time. The company currently has a 40,000 square foot office in Potrero Hill area of San Francisco.

Earlier this week when driving by the building I noticed that the Jewelry Mart was gone wasn’t there was some furious activity going in the building. (Update: A commenter says that the jewelry mart is there and so are the other jewelers and they are going to benefit from the improvements that are being made as part of AirBnB’s entry into the building.) Initially I thought perhaps this was the new Pinterest office. I was intrigued only because we had reported that Pinterest was moving from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Well, that didn’t turn out to be the case. Instead it was AirBnB. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the growing popularity of what is known as “B” space with the technology companies.

Real estate industry sources tell us that AirBnB has signed a 10-year-term on three floors (floors 3 through 5) for the building at an average rate of approximately $57 per square foot per year. The exact terms are that the rent is $47 per square foot per year (industrial gross rent) with 3% annual increases. The utilities and janitorial typically work out to about $4 per square foot per year. Half of the space is rent free for nine months, and the landlord will provide around $8,000,000 to improve their space while also doing renovations to the building lobby and other areas.

Pinterest incidentally has moved into 808 Brannan, not too far from the new AirBnB offices. Pinterest took about 55,000 square feet of space. Our real estate sources say that rents in this region are around $50 per square foot per year. At $50 per square foot Pinterest could be paying as much as $2.75 million in rent every year.

While these liberally funded, fast-growing tech companies are having no problems, the smaller startups are finding it tough to find workspaces. When good times return to Silicon Valley, you can count on a sharp increase in the number of startups and the venture dollars invested into these companies, which in turn puts a massive premium on real estate. Even though San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee likes to portray himself as a pro-tech mayor, the fact remains that things are getting rough for the little guys.

Great names do some of the work for you. They market your company just by being out there: Last.fm, SoundCloud, KissMetrics and Groupon all come to mind. One of my favorite company names in tech is Wildfire, a company that makes social media marketing apps. Once you hear the name in context, the name will forever be stored in your brain. It clicks because it contains a strong hint of what the product does: it makes your promotion spread like… you know what.

Most of the names out there are just OK. They don’t make your life any easier or harder: Highrise, Yammer, Spotify. But it’s OK to have an OK name.

Where you don’t want to be is in the third category — having a name that associates your product with the wrong things and acts as a show-stopper. Think Pen Island or a name I once proposed for a networking service – Loopus.in (which associates with lupus for anyone who has watched even one episode of House).

So how do you make the right decision?

I’ve recently been involved in choosing a name for a couple of startup projects, and it gave me an opportunity to try and understand how to do it better. Here’s what I found:

Decide where your name should fit

Will your name be descriptive like Internet Explorer and Facebook or abstract like Badoo and Skype (s MSFT? Most names are word mutations somewhere in the middle, like Klout, Flattr and Pinterest.

When you have a big marketing and media budget, you have more of a choice, but for most name hunters this isn’t the case — so homework is needed. The first step in the naming process is to do a few broad Google searches and check relevant directory/app store listings. You’ll soon have a good idea where you want your name to fit. If everyone is zigging with ‘awesome’ web 2.0 names, sometimes you want to zag and go for something old school like ITT Electron Tube Company. Other times you want to blend in, for example if you’re making a golf application, you might want to have ‘golf’ in the name somewhere. Then, of course, there are often SEO considerations to bear in mind.

Write a brief, and make sure everyone agrees on it

Unless you work on your startup idea by yourself, write the result from the previous exercise down. It’s also helpful to create list of words you want your name to associate with and stick it to your screen or wall until you’ve found your perfect name. For example: “instant” and “coaching” when you’re naming a real-time sports feedback app, or “news” for a content curation tool.

Then make sure all the founders and stakeholders agree with the brief. One recent naming experience involved switching back and forth between names that contained a strong hint at what the company does and abstract names because one of the founders wasn’t quite sure at the beginning. It wasted a lot of hours for everybody on the team.

Don’t brainstorm

Perhaps it’s just me, but I have yet to attend a useful naming brainstorm. Time is much more efficiently used if the same people do some thinking on their own and then exchange their ideas via very short meetings and/or email. This allows for creative exchanges to happen, unlike “brainstorms” where someone is forced to write bad names on a whiteboard and others are forced to look at that person’s backside.

So instead of summoning everyone to a meeting, go for a walk or jog or swim or whatever, keeping the list of desired associations in mind. Say the words out loud, look for rhymes, synonyms, legends, stories and expressions that come to mind. Often the best ideas come when you’re not sitting by your computer and your brain is relaxed.

Use generators and crowd sourcing – but with caution

It may be worth the time to check out name-creating services such as NameJet and Domainsbot. Sometimes you’ll hit the jackpot of discovering a great name which is on sale for a reasonable price. Wordoid and LeanDomainSearch are also worth a shot.

Crowd-sourcing is not ideal for naming, because a few people spending a lot of time on a name usually yields a better result than a lot of people spending a little time. But it is much more useful when it comes to validating a name. Services like Pickfu allow you to get a second opinion quickly if you’re stuck between two options. If you’re looking for more in-depth feedback, you can set up a survey with SurveyMonkey and have your customers, followers or strangers over at Mechanical Turk give you their two cents. The main thing is not to ask your friends alone — your target group has a different taste and your friends are sometimes simply too polite.

Remember that the most important thing is memorability

Sometimes name searches end with one strong candidate which is everyone’s favorite — and the domain is available too, yay! More often than not you need to make choices and compromises. Do you go for perfect name with .me domain or the second best option with .com domain? One that passes the “I can say that over the phone without having to spell it out” test or the one that all team members prefer?

Jason Calacanis has written a great post about naming a startup where he concludes that being able to spell the domain correctly and having a short name are the most important criteria. In my experience the most important view of a name is memorability. Google has gotten pretty good at handling typos, and a bit of SEO work will land searchers in the right place even without a .com domain. If people remember your name, they’ll find you. If you don’t believe me, ask Buffer, AngelList or Pocket.

Andrus Purde is a startup marketer and co-founder of Achoo, a network that makes people’s achievements show.

For all you kids who don’t know MAD magazine, well Google it, and then go find the old copies and enjoy some good wit and humor. However, of course, if you had to reinvent and re-imagine MAD magazine for the post-Facebook, post-Twitter and the post-YouTube generation, you would completely eschew the paper and focus on the iPad instead. (Yes, I do know MAD has just launched an iPad app.) And it would takes its cues from Internet/social-driven Pop Culture and turn it into a sort of a game.

And that is exactly what Punch! Mediaof New York is doing. The start-up is co-founded by David S. Bennahum (CEO,) Maer Roshan (Founding Editor,) Ethan Fletcher (Chief Operating Officer,) Dany Levy and Daniel Wyszynski who is Chief Technology Officer. The effort is backed by John Borthwick’s Betaworks, David Tisch, New Enterprise Associates and Jason Calacanis. Incidentally, Roshan was building Radar, a gossip rag right next door to the old Red Herring offices in an incubator on 11th street back in the day, so it seems he has a thing for incubators.

What the app has done is essentially take popular videos and Internet memes and turned them into fun-interactive graphical games. Click on an icon and it opens up a window of Bjork going postal on a TV reporter in Thailand. Click another and another video or a game pops up. Here is how they themselves describe it in their press release

Punch! is an interactive satirical app that redefines the content experience with game-like engagement and razor sharp design. Punch! fuses the experience of mobile games with real-time web offerings to present content in a way that can only exist on a tablet. It is a new iPad Platform that encourages users to “play with pop culture.”

Punch! produces original content exclusively showcased in “The Culture Shelf,” a series of scrollable shelves presenting diverse cultural offerings – both high and low. Punch! feels like an interactive variety show, featuring a range of pop culture sketches and vignettes that combine animation, sound, web applications such as YouTube and Google Maps, and social sharing tools.

Sure there is a lot of kitsch on this site, but I can tell you, the dumb stuff was not this much fun. I hope you get a chance to play with it. It is free and you can download it from the app store on your iPad.

]]>Last month at DLD in Munich, in front of top execs from investor Burda, Jason Calacanis offered a fairly staid explanation for the decision to “pivot” Mahalo from “human-powered” search/content factory to an education-centric enterprise. At Signal LA, not so staid. Calacanis came out swinging against low-quality mass content, invoking Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and offering mea culpas for his own example, but also calling out Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) for Associated Content and Answers, AOL (NYSE: AOL) for Seed, and newly public Demand Media (NYSE: DMD). Then, he went full Jason — calling for an ad boycott of Demand, among other things. The result was a lot more f*** you than planned as he demanded an end to the content farm arms race. Video below:

]]>Chartbeat, an analytics startup that provides subscribers with a snapshot of how people are interacting with their sites — in real time — has raised $3 million in a first round of funding. The company, which was incubated at NYC-based tech investor Betaworks and launched in April 2009, pitches its service as an alternative to Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Analytics, saying that while “Google Analytics can tell you how many people loaded a page in a given time period, ChartBeat can tell you how many people kept the page open and are on it right now, and whether they are actively interacting with it.”

Chartbeat says it has 2,500 paying customers, including Gawker Media, the Chicago Tribune and DailyKos. The new funding round was led by Index Ventures. Other investors include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Lowercase Capital and Jason Calacanis.

When entrepreneur Jason Calacanis shut down his blog in 2008 and replaced it with a subscription-only email newsletter, his move seemed to be more of a personal response to abusive reader comments rather than a leading indicator of a trend (although software guru Joel Spolsky also shut down his blog earlier this year). But now others have joined the blog exodus: Sam Lessin, the founder of streaming-media startup Drop.io, recently announced he was shutting down his blog and starting a subscription newsletter — one that charges readers a monthly fee. And since he is also an entrepreneur, he started his own subscription-newsletter service too, which is called Letter.ly. On the Drop.io blog, Lessin said that he started blogging in 2008 with a defined set of goals, including:

Understanding the medium: “I strongly believed that it was an important medium to understand and that the only way I would really ‘get’ it would be to make a serious commitment to it.”

Protecting online identity: “I personally found that if you don’t own your own identity, others are more than happy to hijack it and use it for their own ends.”

Intellectual rigor: “I was letting myself get a bit lazy/sloppy in my thinking and I thought that forcing myself to take a public position would force me to hone my positions.”

Being taken seriously: “I thought that there was ‘margin’ in the medium… meaning, more people that I cared about read and took blogs seriously per-unit of work/input.”

The Drop.io founder said that after two years, he felt that he had achieved all of his goals, but added that he felt writing a public blog that was available for free to readers was “exceedingly disingenuous if not straight hypocritical given my strong belief in the value of information” (Letter.ly is designed to allow newsletter writers to set their own price for subscriptions, and the Drop.io founder’s blog is $1.99 a month). Lessin also mentioned a factor that others argue has contributed to a decline in blogging — namely, the rise of Twitter and Facebook and other social tools that are easier to use and require a smaller investment of time, or what Lessin calls “passive and active data-streams.”

Since setting up Letter.ly, Lessin has been joined by several other bloggers, including Nate Westheimer — co-founder of video-indexing startup AnyClip — who says he plans to continue blogging but will share in-depth startup tips and other thoughts through his premium newsletter. Aviary.com co-founder Michael Galpert has also started a newsletter through Letter.ly. And Jason Baptiste, co-founder of several startups including Cloudomatic, argues that while they may seem somewhat stale and old-fashioned, email newsletters can still be a good business (although Lessin charges for his newsletter, Jason Calacanis’s version is free, but subscription is limited).

Not everyone agrees that moving from a blog to a subscription newsletter is a good move, however, particularly for startups and entrepreneurs — since sharing your ideas with a broader audience can have its own value, especially when you aren’t well-known. Former investment banker-turned-entrepreneur Steve Cheney recently described how he asked Hunch co-founder and angel investor Chris Dixon for advice on what he should do to raise his profile, and Dixon responded: “Start a blog.” It’s worth noting that .